Yugoslav Sojourn: Notes from the Other
Side

January 2000

Anyone in the United States seeking to hop
a plane to Belgrade discovers that it cannot be done. The international
sanctions imposed against Yugoslavia ended all air travel to what remains
of that beleaguered country. This past August, I and a group of North
Americans, endeavoring to bring medicines to the Yugoslav Red Cross and
glean a first-hand impression of the country, had to fly to Budapest,
Hungary, then endure a seven-hour bus ride (counting the long delay at
the border) to reach Belgrade.

Belgrade is a city with a funky beauty
of its own, with cobblestone malls, elaborate monuments, parks, and
elegantly aging edifices sporting a distinctly Old World patina. There
are more cars than one would have expected in a country suffering from
sanctions. The people do not appear haggard, hungry, depressed, or unhealthy.
There are no beggars or derelicts to be seen; no one in tatters; no
one asleep in a doorway or rummaging through garbage cans; no cadres
of prostitutes plying their trade. The free market has not yet taken
complete hold. A welfare state still exists, which, in the eyes of some
neoliberal western leaders, may be Yugoslavia’s biggest crime. The state-supported
economy has prevented the kind of mass social misery witnessed in some
other Eastern European countries.

Speaking of crime, there seems to be
little fear of it in Belgrade. We strolled for hours around the city
and could see women walking alone or together well past midnight, displaying
not a trace of apprehension. In the evening, the parks are crowded with
people, unlike parks in some U.S. cities that empty out after sundown.
To the organizer of our delegation, Barry Lituchy, a historian who teaches
at Kingsborough Community College in the City University of New York,
Belgrade appeared noticeably poorer and more worn than on his visit
four years earlier. One new sign of hard times is the overabundance
of street vendors with their paltry offerings of recycled knickknacks,
clothing, CDs, tapes, books, magazines, cosmetics, and bootlegged cigarettes
and liquor.

All over the city one sees graffiti denouncing
NATO, the United States, and Bill Clinton in the most bitter terms.
“NATO” is repeatedly represented with the “N” in the form of a swastika.
More than once I saw “Free Texas” sprayed across walls. As one citizen
explained, Texas is heavily populated by Mexicans or persons of Mexican
descent, many of whom suffer more serious cultural discrimination and
economic adversity than did Kosovo Albanians; should not Yugoslavia
and other nations do whatever they can to make Texas into a separate
polity for oppressed Mexicans? The same logic applied to the "Free Corsica"
graffiti sprayed across the French cultural center, gutted, along with
the US and British cultural centers, by outraged Yugoslavs.

We passed a billboard displaying a large
image of a beautifully colored Easter egg, with the saying (in English)
“They believe in bombs. We believe in God.” Along with its many churches,
Belgrade reveals remnants of its Communist past. Many streets and buildings
are named for famous communist leaders and partisan fighters. One major
thoroughfare is “Boulevard of the Revolution,” another is “Lenin Boulevard,”
and another is “Brotherhood and Unity Highway.” Surely, I thought, U.S.
leaders will not leave this country alone until those names are changed
to “IMF Avenue” and “Morgan Trust Way,” or at least renamed after some
orthodox saints or reactionary military heroes of yore.

We visited the Chinese embassy, an architecturally
distinct edifice standing on a broad lot with only some housing projects
in the background, much of its interior pulverized by three missiles.
The CIA's claim that the attack was a case of mistaken identity seemed
less credible than ever to us. Even a cursory inspection makes one wonder
how the CIA could have mistaken the embassy for the Federal Directorate
of Supply, an office building two blocks away. The U.S. ambassador had
dined at the Chinese embassy and many U.S. journalists had visited it
in its better days. If NATO attackers really did rely on “old maps”
(why in this instance and not in any other?), such maps would have shown
an empty lot. More plausible is the view that the embassy was deliberately
targeted because the Chinese were giving such strong support to Belgrade,
and possibly because the embassy was being used to gather electronic
intelligence on U.S. aerial flights over Yugoslavia. On the embassy
gate, under the pictures of the three employees who perished in the
bombing, Yugoslav citizens had left candles, flowers and condolence
cards.

* * *

The Serbs I spoke to sometimes downplayed
the damage they had suffered from NATO’s attacks, out of a sense of
pride, as if to tell the NATO bully, “You haven’t hurt us all that much.”
At the same time, they wanted to educate foreign visitors about the
destruction perpetrated against them. Our Serbian hosts tried to describe
the deafening noise, flames, and smoke that made the bombings a terrifying
experience. The aerial attacks came every evening and frequently went
on all night (rarely during the day in Belgrade). Five hundred meters
from where we were staying, a private home had been hit and some of
its residents killed. The survivors put up a sign on the damaged facade
bitterly announcing: “Sorry, we are still alive.” For some, it was so
strange, all this death coming from the skies. Even stranger was the
way everything now appeared back to normal, with much of the wreckage
cleared away. "It seems as if it never happened, like it was a bad dream,"
remarked one man.

Still there are plenty of reminders.
Displayed in various police stations around the city are dozens of photos
of officers killed while performing rescue operations or other duties
during the aerial attacks. Casualties among rescue workers were high.
NATO had devised the devilish technique of bombing a site, then waiting
fifteen minutes to a half hour—just time enough for rescue teams to
arrive and get working—then hitting the target a second time, killing
many of the would-be rescuers, and making it extremely dangerous for
teams to dig for survivors. This method of delayed follow-up attack
on a civilian target had never been tried before in modern warfare.
It was one of NATO’s innovative war crimes.

The facilities destroyed by air attacks
were mostly publicly owned. The Usce business center was hit by several
missiles. This high-rise contained the headquarters of Slobodan Milosevic’s
Socialist Party, and also housed the headquarters of JUL (Yugoslav United
Left), a coalition of 23 communist and left parties, closely allied
with the Socialist Party. Various ministry offices were demolished.
The huge, state-run Hotel Yugoslavia was made uninhabitable by NATO
missiles, while the corporate owned Hyatt Hotel, with its even more
imposing, all-glass facade—as inviting a target as any mad bomber might
want—suffered not a scratched windowpane. Buildings that displayed
highly visible rooftop advertising signs that read “Panasonic,” “Coca-Cola,” “Diners Club International,” and “McDonald’s,’ the latter replete with
immense golden arches, survived perfectly intact.

The destruction in other cities and towns
was far greater than anything inflicted upon Belgrade. Several neighborhoods
in the small mining town of Aleksinac were entirely wiped out. Production
facilities in Nis and Cuprija were reduced to rubble. Kragujevac, an
industrial city in Central Serbia, suffered immense damage. Its huge,
efficiently state-run Zastava factory was thoroughly demolished, causing
huge amounts of toxic chemicals to spill from the factory's generators.
Zastava had employed tens of thousands of workers who produced cars,
trucks, and tractors sold domestically and abroad. NATO attacks left
some 80 percent of its workforce without a means of livelihood. Publicly
owned Zastava factories exist all over Yugoslavia. The attackers knew
their locations, and destroyed many of them. Those not bombed are out
of production for want of crucial materials or a recipient for their
products.

In Nis, cruise missiles pulverized the
tobacco and cigarette production plant, one of the most successful in
Europe. State-run food processing sites were leveled. And, we were told,
one worker-managed factory was contaminated with depleted uranium.

The city of Aleksinac and additional
socialist strongholds in southern Serbia were bombed especially heavily,
with many civilian deaths. Leaders from Aleksinac and several other
cities in Serbia’s “Red Belt” were convinced that they were pounded
so mercilessly primarily because they were socialist, a suspicion reinforced
by the fact that the region contained almost no heavy industry.

NATO bombed historic sites, cultural
monuments, museums, and churches. “Not even Hitler did that,” remarked
Federal Minister for Refugees Bratislava Morina. In Novi Sad, worker-managed
factories that somehow had survived the pitiless years of sanctions
were reduced to ruins, along with bus and train depots. Major bridges
were knocked down, blocking all shipping on the Danube, cluttering the
river's bottom with heavy metal, and severing most of Serbia from the
rest of Europe. Because of its depth, the Danube was judged impossible
to clean, but millions of people are still drinking its water.

Yugoslav electrical and construction
firms used to be competitive with western ones, winning contracts abroad
on a regular basis. The NATO bombing eliminated that competition quite
nicely. Heating plants and the entire oil processing industry were badly
crippled. The chief engineer at an electrical power transformer station
on the outskirts of Zemun showed us transformers that had been knocked
out by a variety of weaponry including tomahawk cruise missiles, phosphorus
bombs, and air-to-surface missiles. Other missiles, designed for subterranean
targets, exploded beneath the earth's surface, ripping apart underground
transmitter cables. There was little hope of repair since international
sanctions deprived the Yugoslavs of replacement parts made by Westinghouse.

The inability to rebuild their electrical
power systems leaves many towns and cities throughout Serbia without
any prospect of heat in the winter ahead, and without sufficient means
of supplying water to certain urban populations. There is no shortage
of water in Yugoslavia, especially after the summer rains that caused
serious floods. But water distribution and purification systems in places
like Novi Sad are badly damaged and not easy to repair. Whole sectors
of the city are without drinking water, but water is available for washing
clothes and waste elimination.

The destruction of fertilizer and nitrogen
plants has created difficulties for next year's planting. One official
told us that agricultural crops were mysteriously dying. The situation
was being investigated, and there was much fear of hunger ahead. At
one oil refinery site we saw burnt-out cars, shattered storage tanks,
and acres blackened with crude oil, leaving the groundwater toxified.
We saw a bird about the size of a robin, completely drenched in black
crude and bleeding from the burning effect of the oil. It was unable
to do anything except weakly flutter its wings and stagger about the
road.

Sometimes the NATO attackers carefully
selected their targets; other times they seemingly unloaded at random.
Generally, Minister Morina maintained, they hit sites “in a way that
would be most painful to us.” We saw one housing project of some seventy
units destroyed. The occupants had lost all their possessions, and most
were without money to pay for new residences. We were told that many
of the housing project’s survivors had sustained injuries, and many
were suffering psychological shock and depression. An adjacent elementary
school, named after Svetozar Markovich, identified to us as “the founder
of socialism in the Balkans,” was seriously damaged, but undergoing
reconstruction.

We visited a village outside Novi Sad,
containing nothing that remotely resembled a military or infrastructure
target. Yet, ten homes had been hit. Some of them remained occupied
with Serb refugees from Croatia, looking like stage-set homes with front
walls and rooftops missing. The occupants had no jobs and no funds to
buy the materials needed to rebuild, nor were building materials readily
available. Plastic sheets over shattered windows and an outdoor cooking
stove were all the comforts they had for the oncoming winter.

In Nis, Surdulica, and Aleksinac there
were deliberate attacks on residential neighborhoods. On one street
in Nis, fifteen residents were killed by cluster bombs—our tax dollars
at work. Members of our delegation met people who still shook with fear
when talking about the attacks. Most had no hope of rebuilding.

In Rakovica and elsewhere, NATO bombs
smashed hospitals and maternity wards. Not long after the bombing ended,
NATO officials announced that only a few hundred people had been killed
by the aerial attacks. How they arrived at this figure from afar is
hard to understand. According to Yugoslav sources, over five hundred
military personnel and some two thousand civilians perished in what
was less a war than a one-sided slaughter. Scores of individuals listed
as missing may still be buried under the wreckage. “Who will be charged
with these war crimes?” one citizen asked angrily. After the war, health
workers began seeing a dramatic increase in chronic ailments, including
cardiovascular, respiratory, and mental health problems. Officials thought
the 78-days of bombings would be the worst of it, but they have since
concluded that the sanctions would continue to inflict massive attrition.

Prevented from going into Kosovo, the
Yugoslav Red Cross is unable to trace hundreds of missing persons (Serbs,
nonseparatist Albanians, and others) in areas occupied by KFOR, the
NATO occupation force. Some 130 humanitarian organizations are pouring
aid into Kosovo, including Red Cross societies from KFOR states. The
operating rules of the International Red Cross stipulate that member
organizations entering a country must work in cooperation with the Red
Cross of that host country, something not done in this case by most
of them. Letters of protest from the Yugoslav Red Cross to these member
organizations have gone unanswered. Relatively few national Red Cross
societies have responded well to Yugoslavia’s appeal for help: the Bulgarian,
Rumanian, and all the Scandinavian Red Cross organizations have sent
aid. And much assistance has come from Red Cross organizations in China
and, surprisingly, Germany.

* * *

Yugoslavia faces a refugee crisis of
daunting magnitude. It now hosts more displaced persons per capita than
just about any other nation. Most of the ethnic cleansing throughout
the former Yugoslavia has been directed against the Serbs, a fact seldom
if ever mentioned in the U.S. media. NATO and its secessionist allies
drove more than 700,000 Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In addition, over several hundred thousand
Serbs, Roma (gypsies), Turks, Gorani, and Albanians (who would not cooperate
with the KLA) have fled Kosovo and flooded into what remains of Yugoslavia.
Some refugees have been triply displaced, fleeing Croatia for Bosnia,
then to Kosovo, and now to what remains of unoccupied Serbia. Three
well-constructed refugee settlements built several years ago by the
Serbian Republic, intended as permanent homes, were destroyed by NATO
attacks, as was the headquarters of the Serbian Socialist party agency
that dealt with refugee problems.

One of the hardest hit groups in the
KLA cleansing of Kosovo was the Roma. Driven out of homes they had lived
in for generations, many fled to Macedonia—only to find that the refugee
camps there were run by KLA. In order to gain entry, they had to pay
500 German marks and declare Albanian nationality, according to the
refugees interviewed by Sani Rifati, president of Voice of Roma, an
educational and humanitarian aid organization based in California. Rifati
traveled to Italy to deliver aid and interview Romany refugees arriving
in Brindisi. They told of being surrounded by police upon arrival, then
approached by Albanian interpreters who informed them that in order
to procure food they would have to present themselves as Albanians fleeing
from Serbs—instead of what they really were, Roma fleeing from Albanian
KLA militia.

Unlike ethnically cleansed Croatia, Bosnia,
and Kosovo, Yugoslavia remains a multi-ethnic society, with some twenty-six
nationality groups, including Serbs and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians,
Croats, Rumanians, Czechs, and Slovaks. Yugoslavia is the only country
in the world to give official standing to 19,000 Ruthenians, a national
group of western Ukrainian origin situated in Vojvodina, Serbia's other
autonomous province (besides Kosovo). Vojvodina officials claim that
all these various nationalities have education in their own languages
from nursery school to high school. Hungarians in Vojvodina can go through
medical school studying in Hungarian. Minister Morina claimed that before
the NATO war, there had been some fifty Albanian-language publications
in Yugoslavia, including even a Playboy type magazine. She said that
in earlier times Albanians had occupied such prominent offices as the
presidency of Yugoslavia, the presidency of the national youth organization,
and of the trade union association. Albanians would still have prominent
political positions in the society, she maintained, had they not chosen
to withdraw from the political process. Morina's own husband was director
of security and an Albanian, and her children identified themselves
as Albanian.

The proceedings of Vojvodina’s provincial
parliament were simultaneously translated into six languages, according
to its president Zivorad Smiljanic, a gynecologist and obstetrician
by profession, who met with our group when we visited Novi Sad. At present,
U.S. leaders are busily funneling money to Hungarian separatist elements
in Vojvodina and calling for putting the province under Hungary’s suzerainty.
Smiljanic pointed out that two million Hungarians in Rumania and 600,000
in Slovakia enjoyed few of the national rights extended to the 300,000
Hungarian ethnics in Vojvodina, yet the United States and even Hungary
seemed not too concerned about them. The Hungarians living in Vojvodina
are not concentrated in any one region. In 1991 some of them went to
Hungary but did not fare too well, Smiljanic said. In 1999, facing the
NATO war, almost no Hungarians departed and 90 percent responded to
the military call. Indeed, he claimed, all national minorities remain
loyal to their country, Yugoslavia.

Smiljanic held forth on a number of other
subjects: As an obstetrician he had occasion to observe the remains
of eleven children killed in one town by the aerial attack. Your leaders
talk about human rights, he noted bitterly, but the right of children
to live is among the highest of human rights. Was it democracy in action
when NATO bombs destroyed schools, daycare centers, and hospitals with
patients in their beds? Your leaders talk of freedom of information,
yet they kill journalists. They talk of responsible government and accountable
rule, yet nineteen Nato countries engaged in hostilities against Yugoslavia
without consent of any of their own parliaments and against mass protests
in their countries. All the government parties in the NATO countries
that partook of the war lost seats in the subsequent elections to the
European parliament, said Smiljanic.

When asked what were Vojvodina's most
urgent needs, Smiljanic boomed, “We wish most of all that the international
community would leave us alone, lift the sanctions, and stop giving
us the benefit of their ‘guidance’ and ‘aid.’” Despite ten years of
sanctions, he went on, his compatriots live better than do most people
in Hungary, Rumania, Poland, and Bulgaria. And now that those nations
are joining NATO they will plunge still deeper into debt, each borrowing
tens of billions of dollars to upgrade their military forces to NATO
standards. “Clinton and Albright have destroyed us and now we will have
to rebuild—on their terms. The only god worshipped in the New World
Order is the Dollar. The war was good only for business and arms dealers,”
concluded Smiljanic.

* * *

A founding member of the United Nations
and of the Nonaligned Nations Conference, and once a regular participant
in UN peacekeeping missions, Yugoslavia today has been reduced to a
pariah, the only country to have been expelled from the United Nations.
It is also proudly one of the few nations in Europe that never asked
to join NATO.

Western leaders and media have tirelessly
portrayed the Milosevic government as a bloodthirsty dictatorship. The
Yugoslavs argue that this “dictatorship” has a democratically elected
coalition government with a parliament containing representation from
seven different parties, including vocal opposition ones. The various
parties have their own newspapers, which are sold at newsstands around
Belgrade. Indeed, there are only two state-owned dailies but numerous
opposition publications, some of which are well financed from abroad.
Meanwhile cafes and theaters perform skits mercilessly satirizing Milosevic,
and thousands have demonstrated against his government without fear
of being gunned down by death squads or incarcerated for long periods—which
is the risk demonstrators run in any number of US-backed regimes.

I saw opposition posters in Belgrade,
including glass encased ones on the walls of buildings along main thoroughfares,
damning Milosevic in the harshest terms, with the address of the sponsoring
organization provided at the bottom of the poster—hardly an advisable
way to operate when living under the heel of a ruthless dictator. For
a police state, Yugoslavia appears to suffer from a notable scarcity
of police on the streets. Not until my third evening in Belgrade did
I see two cops strolling along without benefit of nightsticks—in marked
contrast to the omnipresent and heavily armed security police and military
personnel one sees in any number of U.S. client-state “democracies”
in Latin America and elsewhere. In addition, Yugoslav citizens are free
to travel anywhere in the world—which is not true of U.S. citizens.

Milosevic recently did one thing that
must have convinced western capitalist leaders of his inhumanity. The
ICN pharmaceutical plant in Yugoslavia began as a joint venture with
state and private capital. Much of the latter was provided by Milan
Panic, a rich Serbian businessman who had been living in the United
States. Panic began paying a private staff to take over complete ownership
of ICN. (He is also said to have tried to organize a strike against
the Yugoslav government after losing his bid for the presidency in 1992.)
In February 1999, in response to Panic’s maneuvers, Milosevic sent in
troops to occupy ICN, then handed it over to worker-management. U.S.
media called the takeover a violation of “human rights.”

U.S. officials and press pundits repeatedly
claim that Yugoslavs do not have the benefit of an objective news source,
by which they mean the western corporate-owned mainstream media that
faithfully propagate the US-NATO line on all matters of war and peace.
In fact, as of summer’s end, western or pro-western media were just
about the only major news source one could access in Belgrade. The three
government television channels 1, 2, and 3, and all public radio stations—most
of which offered a critical view of NATO's policy of dismembering, privatizing,
and deindustrializing Yugoslavia—were bombed out of existence. “They
destroyed everything,” exclaimed our boarding-house host Nikola Moraca,
“We get no Milosevic government station, only opposition programs and
sports.”

Yugoslavs could also get CNN, BBC, Discovery,
and German television. If they had satellite dishes, as many did, they
could receive all the U.S. networks. Not surprisingly, the Yugoslav
opposition television channel, Studio B, survived untouched by NATO
bombs. It presents mostly opposition programming and entertainment.
Other Yugoslav TV stations do offer “TV Politika” (a pro-government
program) and what Nikola called “neutral programs” along with sitcoms,
fashion shows, and other such puffery. In sum, the Yugoslavs had access
to more pro-western media than to any that might represent a critical
view of western policy. In this, they resemble most of the world.

* * *

On the van I took for the long night's
trip back to Budapest, I met my first Serbian yuppie: a young broker
who worked via computer with the New York Stock Exchange. He was of
the opinion that Milosevic was not a war criminal but still should hand
himself over to the Hague Tribunal, just so the rest of the country
could get some peace (as if having Milosevic’s head would cause western
leaders to leave Yugoslavia in peace). He went on to tell me what a
wonderful place Belgrade was to live in, with its remarkable abundance
of beautiful women and its low prices. The ample income he made went
twice as far in the economically depressed city. His comments reminded
me that hard times are not hard for everyone, especially not for people
with money.

The van made an additional stop in Belgrade
to pick up an attractive but unhappy looking young woman who, once seated,
began crying as she told us that she was going to Spain for a long and
indefinite period, leaving home and family because things were so difficult
in Yugoslavia. War victimizes all sorts of people who are never included
in the final toll.

It was not long before the stockbroker,
displaying a most sympathetic demeanor, was making his moves on the
young lady, as if encircling a prey. Again, I was reminded of how hard
times for the many bring new opportunities for the privileged few.